Last Hours (11:20) – This was made 9 years ago

Well, most of us just survived not just the hottest recorded month in history, but the hottest in 120,000 years. Don’t pat yourselves on the back. There will be more coming, and what is coming with it could be simply scary.

Lyndon Johnson warned us 60 years ago after he received a report from a science advisory committee entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted: 

Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations.

Since then we have done almost nothing on a globe scale but increase the amount of greenhouse gas pollutions. In the decades between then and now scientists have continued to refine their techniques and their findings. They have made predictions based on their science. The predictions have for the most part come true. 

Companies, particularly fossil fuel companies, have done all they can to stop real information from getting out while also filling news media with disinformation concerning their products and their effects on the global climate. You folks know all that.

But we have that as a background as we hear the dire warnings that were sounded this week. While these warnings are dire and the predictions of a climate crisis beginning much sooner than expected America’s news disseminators were focused like a laser on the Hunter Biden non-story with only a passing reference to the climate.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson had perhaps the best summary in her morning newsletter on Thursday. She had only a few paragraphs but they were powerful. The bottom line is that we don’t have a lot of time to figure this out:

Yesterday a team of international researchers confirmed that human-caused climate change is driving the life-threatening heat waves in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. has broken more than 2,000 high temperature records in the past month, and it looks like July will be the hottest month on Earth since scientists have kept records.

Another study published yesterday warns that the Atlantic currents that transport warm water from the tropics north are in danger of collapsing as early as 2025 and as late as 2095, with a central estimate of 2050. As Arctic ice melts, the cold water that sinks and pulls the current northward is warming, slowing the mechanism that moves the currents. The collapse of that system would disrupt rain patterns in India, South America, and West Africa, endangering the food supplies for billions of people. It would also raise sea levels on the North American east coast and create storms and colder temperatures in Europe.

On Sunday and Monday, the ocean water off the tip of Florida reached temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius), the same temperature as an average hot tub. According to the Coral Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Florida’s Key Largo that works to protect coral reefs, the hot water has created “a severe and urgent crisis,” with mortality up to 100%. The Mediterranean Sea also hit a record high this week, reaching 83.1 degrees Fahrenheit (28.4 Celsius).

An op-ed by David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times today noted that more land burned in Quebec in June than in the previous 20 years combined; across Canada, more than 25 million acres burned. And most of Canada’s fire season is still ahead.

Professor Ian Lowe of Australia’s Griffith University told The Guardian that he recalled reading the 1985 report that identified the link between greenhouse gasses and climate change, and worked to draw public attention to it. “Now all the projected changes are happening,” he said. “I reflect on how much needless environmental damage and human suffering will result from the work of those politicians, business leaders and public figures who have prevented concerted action. History will judge them very harshly.”

Former vice president Mike Pence, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, today unveiled his economic proposal. It calls for eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Biden administration’s incentives designed to address climate change.

Thom Hartmann posting on the climate crisis the same day as Heather Cox Richardson had this dire warning for Europe:

You may remember the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which large parts of Europe and the American East Coast suddenly freeze up?

The plot device is that the Great Conveyor Belt — also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — which brings heat from the south Pacific around the southern tip of Africa and up the east coast of the Americas (we call it the Gulf Stream) into the North Atlantic and Europe shuts down.

The AMOC and the heat it brings to the North Atlantic ocean is the main reason why London (at the same latitude as Calgary) has a relatively temperate climate year-round, instead of being snowbound six months out of the year.

It’s why Europe can grow enough food to feed its 740+ million people; if the AMOC was to stop transporting all that heat to the North Atlantic, the continent could be plunged into famine in a matter of years or decades (the movie was heavily dramatized).

The IPCC has warned of this possibility but had placed the danger zone for the failure of the AMOC in the early 22^nd century, well past the lifetimes of most people living today. That proclamation moved it off most of our immediate-attention screens.

Now, however, might be a good time to watch the movie again: a new study published in Nature Communications last week titled “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” reports that global warming forced by all the CO2 and methane in our atmosphere — if we don’t do something immediately — could shut down the AMOC as early as 2025 and almost certainly before 2095.

AS EARLY AS 2025!